Existing usage of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in conjunction with a transportation network or system is constrained by several factors. Among these are the cost of UAS with sufficient range and endurance to cover a transportation system, lack of terrestrial Command and Control (C2) communications systems, and regulatory hurdles for beyond line-of-sight (LOS) operation of a UAS. For example, a transportation system may need surveillance capability to inspect and monitor the condition of infrastructure elements, monitor the overall system status to verify nominal operation, and monitor for security threats. Road- or rail-based transportation systems, for example, tend to have long linear routes with a small area footprint distributed over long distances. Similarly, a road-based or rail-based system are examples of a transportation system technologically constrained to the boundaries of its network. While UAS air vehicles may expand the coverage area of such a network, small UAS (sUAS) vehicles have limited range; fixed launch and recovery based installations may require a prohibitive amount of assets to effectively serve the network. However, an increase in UAS vehicle range requires substantial increases to the size and overall mass of the vehicle. These increases lead in turn to proportional increases in cost, but also complicate the ability to operate more massive UAS vehicles (e.g., greater than 300 lb≈136 kg) within the civil national airspace system (NAS). Similarly, operating a UAS vehicle beyond visual/LOS range may require enhanced C2 or payload data communication infrastructure throughout the entirety of the transportation system; satellite communications systems, for example, may be too bulky or expensive for use with sUAS vehicles to be feasible.